The Amazing Spider-Man #14

History

The issue was written by Stan Lee, drawn and co-plotted by Steve Ditko, and lettered by Art Simek — the same core team responsible for the entire Lee-Ditko run of 38 issues. Crucially, the Green Goblin as he appeared in print was fundamentally Ditko's creation, not Lee's: according to Ditko's own published account, Lee's original synopsis imagined a movie crew unearthing an Egyptian sarcophagus from which an ancient mythological demon — the Green Goblin — emerged, whereas Ditko rejected that concept outright and independently redesigned the character as a masked human villain with a technological edge, a choice that gave the character the ambiguity and long-term narrative potential he ultimately delivered. The question of who that human villain actually was became a source of creative friction between the two men: Lee wanted the Goblin's secret identity to be someone already known to readers (ultimately Norman Osborn), while Ditko preferred a stranger whose unmasking would mirror the unpredictability of real-life crime; the dispute remained unresolved when Ditko departed Marvel after issue #38, and the reveal fell to incoming artist John Romita Sr. in issue #39.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of the Green Goblin, one of Spider-Man's three principal archenemies, created in his human-villain form by Steve Ditko after he rejected Stan Lee's original concept of a supernatural demon.
• First meeting of Spider-Man and the Hulk; the Hulk's presence in the issue also marks his last guest appearance in a crossover before he received his own ongoing feature in Tales to Astonish.
• Story title: 'The Grotesque Adventure of the Green Goblin.' Written by Stan Lee, penciled and co-plotted by Steve Ditko, lettered by Art Simek. Cover by Steve Ditko. Published July 1964.
• The Green Goblin's face is deliberately obscured in every panel — shown only twice without the mask, and never identifiably — inaugurating an over-two-year mystery subplot that was not resolved until Amazing Spider-Man #39 (the first issue drawn by John Romita Sr.), where the Goblin is revealed to be Norman Osborn.
• In this debut appearance, the Goblin rides a rocket-powered mechanical broomstick rather than the Goblin Glider associated with later stories; pumpkin bombs are also absent, and his weapons include stun grenades and an exhaust blast capable of burning through Spider-Man's webbing.
• The Goblin's scheme involves recruiting the Enforcers (Fancy Dan, Montana, and Ox) and luring Spider-Man to Hollywood under the pretense of starring in a movie, intending to defeat him on camera and broadcast the humiliation to New York's criminal underworld.
• The story contains a noted in-panel error: the Goblin addresses the three Enforcers as 'the four of you,' an uncorrected mistake preserved in the original printing.
• The issue has been reprinted in Marvel Tales #9 and #152, in the Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: Great Power, in Marvel Masterworks: Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2, and as a Marvel Facsimile Edition (with original ads) and a True Believers reprint (without original ads).

Cast · 11 characters

Full credits

Key issues in The Amazing Spider-Man

★

#121 Death — Death of Gwen Stacy

★

#300 1st full appearance — Venom (Eddie Brock)

★

#129 1st appearance — The Punisher (Frank Castle)

★

#1 1st appearance — J. Jonah Jameson

★

#31 1st appearance — Gwen Stacy

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#3 1st appearance — Otto Octavius

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#50 1st appearance — Wilson Fisk

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#122 Death — Death of the Green Goblin (Norman Osborn)

Variants (1)